The world of search engine optimisation is reassessing one of its core techniques, thanks to an announcement by Google's Matt Cutts.
One of the things Google measures as it indexes a website is PageRank. It defines it like this:
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.
The last point is important for the way websites are put together, as links 'or votes' from one internal page to another will have an effect on PageRank.
It follows, therefore, that good site architecture will contain more links to important pages such as product and contact pages, and fewer to less commercially useful pages such as Terms & Conditions, or the privacy policy.
Since 2005, many webmasters and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts have taken advantage of a special HTML tag attribute called "nofollow". By adding nofollow to a link, you essentially tell Google (and other search engines) not to follow that link, or transfer page rank across them.
The attribute, originally designed to keep low value content out of search results, soon became central to a practice called 'Pagerank sculpting'. By adding 'nofollow' to internal and external links, they attempted to concentrate the link juice to only the most important pages on a site.
However, according to Google's Matt Cutts, the goalposts have now moved. Writing on his blog, he said:
So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
The admission that Pagerank now flows through nofollow links has major implications for website optimisation. But why the change? Matt Cutts again:
For one thing, some crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).
So what to do instead?
I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.
For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.
However, the move has caused a great deal of controversy amongst SEO experts, who believe that the revelation will discourage sites from adding external links to their sites. Rather than nofollow a link, they will just cut it - and weed them out of blog and forum comments.
That said, the advice to concentrate on great content is timely - and given the fact that the new nofollow rules have already been in place for a year, show that Coast Digital's search engine optimisation services are balanced and highly effective. See our case studies to find out how we deliver marketing you can measure.
